


Rescue Spooning 101

by FlamingoQueen



Series: The Ancient Art of Selkies [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Arctic mission, Hypothermia, Hypothermia prevention, Implied/Referenced Blow Jobs, M/M, Naked Cuddling, Selkie Bucky Barnes, Sharing Body Heat, Skin-to-skin "rescue spooning" to be precise, Spooning, Technically a cabin, The blanket is not a blanket, They get naked under a "blanket" together, Thin Ice, Vague HYDRA research base
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23512549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: They end up walking nearly an hour through the snow and ice without anything but the red blinking light to let them know they’re still going in the right direction, and Sam’s just about fed up with this mission when the ice thickness gauge on his reader goes from “plenty sturdy, you could even build a house on this” to “ice, what ice?” in the space of a single in-drawn breath. Then his stomach lurches like he’s missed the last step on the stairs, and everything goes cold and dark and wet.(Or: Sam and Bucky are on a mission in the arctic, when Sam falls through the ice. Howeverwill Bucky warm him up? Hint: Unknown to Sam, Bucky is a selkie who specializes in the ancient art of skin-to-skin “rescue spooning.”)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson
Series: The Ancient Art of Selkies [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1963675
Comments: 24
Kudos: 114
Collections: Sambucky Bingo





	Rescue Spooning 101

**Author's Note:**

> Here is my fill for G3: Heat Wave on my Sambucky Bingo card. ^_^
> 
> There shouldn't be anything triggery here, or even explicitly NSFW, but just in case: This story includes brief and undetailed references to the "a fisherman stole her pelt and now she's trapped as his wife" element in the selkie mythos, which is inherently non-consensual. And mention of poachers. Also, there's some shenanigans going on under that "blanket," but it's very much off the page.

Sam swears and draws his fuzzy hood closer around his face to try—and fail—to guard against the arctic wind currently stabbing him with icy spears. This is the last time he agrees to a mission in the arctic, with Bucky or otherwise. They can find someone else to locate and disarm HYDRA research bases in the vast, frozen wastelands of the north, because Sam is having none of this.

He could be drinking hot chocolate by a roaring fire right now. Maybe contemplating some mild flirting with a strictly professional coworker, see how that went over, whether maybe said strictly professional coworker was entertaining similar notions. 

That’s what he’d _thought_ he would be doing when he agreed to infiltrate a “snowy HYDRA retreat” with Bucky.

Snow. Retreat. In the winter. With Bucky. Gotta be a ski lodge that doubles as a weapons depot, right? Right?

Wrong.

So wrong.

But by the time they were getting briefed, it was far too late to change his mind. And it’s not like he’d have backed out and left Bucky on his own with a last-minute rando for a partner. 

But still. This could have been a ski lodge. He’d been looking forward to a ski lodge.

Instead of a ski lodge, everything is white. The sky is white, the horizon is white, the ground is white and also not ground at all, but just ice. His coat is white, and it’s not warm enough.

Bucky is a white blur a few yards ahead of him, somehow not a frozen, miserable lump of super soldier in his own white fuzzy getup. Maybe it’s because he’s enhanced, or maybe it’s because this is old news to him after so many trips into and out of a freezer back in the day, or maybe he’s just a good actor and is pretending not to feel the cold through all his layers. 

Maybe the metal arm has a thermal regulator in it pumping warmth through the rest of him.

The device in Sam’s thickly gloved hands adds a flash of red to the sea of white surrounding him, and Sam looks down at the iced-over screen. Red. Have they found something? Finally? 

And will they even be in decent enough shape to infiltrate that something if they have? 

According to the brief, the base they’re looking for is only a research base, and small, and temporary. Handful of scientists, maybe two guards at most. But they’ll all have been keeping warm inside, while he and Bucky will have been wandering around in what might as well be a blizzard.

Sam mumbles into his comm for Bucky to stop and check out his findings, and he gets an equally muffled response before Bucky trudges back toward him.

He’d thought the comms were in case they got separated, since it was pretty blinding white out and they were dressed to blend in on top of that. But with his whole face swaddled in fabric to keep his nose from falling off, and with Bucky’s face similarly decked out—to say nothing of the howling wind—the comms come in handy even face-to-face and all of two feet apart.

Who knew?

“You got something?”

“Think so.” Sam thrusts out the reader. “It’s a bit blurry, but looks like it’s off that way.” He raises an arm to indicate his three o’clock.

Bucky nods, maybe squinting behind his goggles. It’s hard to tell. “Mine didn’t pick up jack shit,” he bitches. “Remind me to rub that in Stark’s face when we’re back.”

Sam grins. “You got it.” Something tells him Bucky will remember to do that all on his own. His memory isn’t nearly as spotty as he pretends it is.

Bucky shrugs off his pack and fumbles around for a beacon to place, so they can trace their steps back and alert the team for exfil once they clear this base. Neither of them want to get turned around once things get interesting, and in this snowscape, that’s a real possibility.

“There.” Bucky stands again and tries to get the pack back on with a muttered curse when the straps get stuck partway up his arms.

“I got you,” Sam says, reaching out to help. The coats and thick gloves are pains in the ass. Warm and necessary pains in the ass, and Sam isn’t going to turn his nose up at them, since all this gear is keeping that nose firmly on his face instead of frostbitten and left behind. But they sure make everything a task and a half to accomplish.

“Thanks, man.” Bucky looks off toward what might be the HYDRA base, and then pointedly does nothing. “No time like the present, I guess.” He continues to do nothing but stand there.

Sam looks at him with a frown. He sounds off, almost uncertain. More so than usual for busting open a HYDRA base with questionable manual dexterity capabilities due to the cold.

“You think it’s a trap or something?”

Bucky shrugs, the motion almost hidden by the thick winter gear. “Just… That’s the sea out that way. With icebergs.”

“The sea?” First off, how does he know what direction _anything_ is, what with the blinding brightness and lack of color. Second off, why does it matter?

“Yeah,” Bucky says, a little shifty. But then, he’s always a little shifty about the sea. Probably sympathy discomfort from Steve being buried in ice in this very ocean. “You’d think they’d be building with something solid underfoot. That’s all.”

Sam gives the reader a poke, toggling a switch to get a reading for the thickness of the ice. “This might as well be solid ground, Barnes. Unless that base is miles off, it’s not going to make a difference. It’s temporary, remember? Built for one season only, so they can keep ahead of us?”

“Yeah.”

Sam narrows his eyes. “Barnes, I need you to level with me. If something’s really off, we should call it in and not pull a Rogers.” Because sure, he does what Steve does, only slower, but part of “slower” means thinking it through and not charging blindly into danger.

Most of the time.

Bucky shakes his head. “It’s not _really_ off. It’s just weird. A little weird. That’s…”

“That’s?” Sam prompts.

“If you go out that way far enough, you get polar bears. And seals. And that’s a terrible idea for where to put your base, even for a single season. Maybe especially for a single season, since your fortifications are going to suck by default ‘cause you’re not really entrenched.”

Sam considers it. “You think they’re going to have to fight off polar bears on top of doing evil science?” Another thought crosses his mind. “More importantly, are you thinking _we’re_ going to be fighting off polar bears on top of raiding evil HYDRA science labs? Because we’re not armed for polar bears.”

“Maybe it’s closer in than that.” Bucky shrugs again. “Readers ought to pick up heat signatures before the heat signatures get within dinner range. It’s probably fine. I’m just being paranoid. I do that sometimes.”

Sometimes. Sam snorts.

“Okay,” he says, mostly to nudge Bucky into action. “Let’s do this, then. While we still have some daylight.”

This isn’t like the practically blind search with scanners they were doing before, where they’re trying to cast a wide-enough net to pull in a signal. So they make their approach close enough together to see each other’s reader screen at a glance. 

While Bucky scans the horizon with his enhanced vision, Sam keeps his eyes on the readers, checking the ice thickness and heat signatures, and looks at the ground beyond the readers to try and see some tracks in the ice and snow. Anything to give them a jump on this base instead of the base having too big a jump on them.

Bucky ought to be seeing _something_ any minute now, even just the first signs of some kind of arctic deer blind to hide a base behind, but they end up walking nearly an hour through the snow and ice without anything but the red blinking light to let them know they’re still going in the right direction.

Sam’s just about fed up with this mission when the ice thickness gauge on his reader goes from “plenty sturdy, you could even build a house on this” to “ice, what ice?” in the space of a single in-drawn breath. Then his stomach lurches like he’s missed the last step on the stairs, and everything goes cold and dark and wet.

* * *

It’s remarkably warm in the afterlife.

And remarkably soft.

And remarkably like having someone at your back with an arm slung over your side and a leg tucked up between your own.

Sam could get used to this afterlife.

* * *

“—ay awake this time, Wilson?”

Sam groans and opens his eyes to a squint. He’s in a little shack, it looks like, with grubby wooden walls that maybe saw some better days a couple decades back, but sure haven’t seen anything good in recent times.

He goes to say something, he isn’t even sure what, and his lungs object strenuously, sending him coughing for a bit before he catches his breath. Shit, it feels like he was practically drowned and the water’s in too deep to cough up.

There’s an arm around him, an open palm pressed against his sternum like an anchor. He’s buried up to his neck in the softest blanket he’s ever encountered, a cool, brindled gray with flecks of black and white.

He doesn’t remember packing blankets for this op. It was only supposed to last a few hours, maybe a day at most.

“That’s right, doll, open your eyes. Stay with me.”

Bucky.

That’s the voice from behind him, the voice the arm and hand belong to. The voice that leg between his own belongs to. The voice that breathes softly against the nape of his neck. Bucky’s voice.

Bucky, his strictly professional coworker.

Sam pokes his brain into gear and it valiantly rises to the occasion… only to belly flop badly and send out a string of words that he could have pulled off if they were mid-banter and he was grinning and they were obviously ribbing each other, but which come out sounding mean, even to his own ears. 

“Didn’t think you’d make it to heaven, Barnes.” 

Why the hell did he say that? Sam gives his brain another poke, this time to chastise it.

“Aw, you think this is heaven,” Bucky murmurs against his skin, lips curling in a smile that sends shivers of a very warm and unprofessional nature down Sam’s spine. “That’s real sweet of you. Near-death really brings out your charm.”

Well, at least Bucky isn’t taking it as an insult. Maybe it came out sounding okay, after all, and not like an accusation about mass murder and decades of political assassinations.

Sam shifts a little, which puts a toe outside the blanket. He jerks his foot back into the warm cocoon under the mystery blanket. _Shit_ , it’s cold out there. He’s not leaving any time soon. Add that to the cough and the ache in his lungs, and he probably _did_ nearly drown. Must have fallen through the ice.

So that means he’s in a hut in the arctic, trapped under a blanket with Bucky. Part of him is surprisingly okay with that. The other part of him is really, _really_ okay with that and is making this sentiment known somewhere that’s thankfully—or unfortunately, depending—not in the immediate vicinity of Bucky’s hand. 

But they have a professional relationship to maintain, and that requires some banter, especially in a time like this. Maybe something to distract himself from the pleasant surprise that is playing the little spoon to Bucky Winter Soldier Barnes.

“Are you naked under here, Barnes?”

“Nakeder’n the day I was born,” comes the reply, and Sam can hear the grin as well as feel it.

Which makes no sense at all. How can you be even more naked than in your skin and nothing else?

“Clothes are still drying by the fire,” Bucky says, sounding almost apologetic. “You weren’t going to last long enough to use them for warmth, and this fire’s shit. Hardly anything in here to burn.”

Sam has so many questions.

Questions like, Where the hell are we? and How did we get here? and Are there polar bears? and Did you take out a HYDRA research station while hauling my frozen, half-drowned ass over your shoulder, or is that base still out there somewhere?

He settles for: “Where’d you get this blanket?” Because priorities, that’s why.

“S’real soft,” he adds. “And warm.”

“…Thanks.”

There is nothing more forthcoming, and Sam is tempted to shuffle around to face Bucky and see why he’s being cagey about a blanket when he’s not being even one ounce cagey about spooning Sam while naked. 

Sam’s not-so-little “situation” down below keeps him where he is, though. “Did you pack it when I wasn’t looking, or did you find it laying around wherever we are?” 

It dawns on him that this might be a poacher’s shack. This might be a seal pelt. This might have been alive as recently as a few months ago. It’s suddenly a lot less pleasant to be curled up under it, though the hot press of Bucky’s skin against his own mostly makes up for that as far as his _situation_ is concerned.

Bucky hesitates. “Guess you could say I packed it.”

Curious.

“So we’re not slumming it in a poacher’s shack, and this isn’t a seal pelt.” Sam feels a lot better now.

“Well.”

“Well?” Sam kind of half-turns, just enough to look at Bucky without letting Bucky get a look—or a feel—at what’s been rapidly developing into a problem between his legs. “Well, what?”

Bucky resolutely refuses to meet his eyes, instead looking at the rough, semi-dilapidated wall beyond Sam’s shoulder. “I’m pretty sure this _is_ a poacher’s hut,” he says. “And it’s _my_ pelt.”

“Your pelt.”

“My pelt.”

Sam’s not sure what to do with that. 

But the confusion is helping calm things down below the waist, and Bucky’s clear discomfort is speeding that process along—it’s hard to be, well, hard, when the inspiration for that stiffy is looking unhappy bordering on fearful. 

So Sam finishes shuffling around to face him. “Your pelt because you have a weird fur security blanket, or your pelt because you thought we might need something that’s somehow even warmer than our winter gear, or…? What, man?”

The answer is a long time coming, and it isn’t exactly an answer at all.

“You know how I was born in Indiana and moved to New York when Steve and me were kids?”

Sam knows that’s what the Smithsonian and Wikipedia and all the rest have to say about it, and he knows _that’s_ where Bucky knows it from instead of because he actually remembers it. But sure, he’ll play the game. “Yeah. Always felt kinda bad for you growing up in Indiana.”

Bucky snorts, though the humor is short-lived. “Well, you don’t have to, anymore. I wasn’t born in Indiana.”

When he stops there, Sam raises his eyebrows in a “go on and tell your story, I ain’t asking shit” expression. But he does add a “Well?” to it.

“Right. Okay, so.” Bucky takes in a breath and lets it out again. “Here’s the thing.” 

Bucky continues in short, clipped statements, eyes fixed on the wall, voice borderline toneless. “I don’t know where I was born. But it wasn’t in America. It was probably something like Greenland. Or Norway. I don’t know. Up north. Where it’s cold. On the ice. As a seal. And _then_ we moved to Brooklyn. Years later. My ma, my sister, me. And I met Steve. And stuff.”

There’s a lot to unpack there while Bucky somehow manages to fidget without moving at all.

Indiana’s a lie? Fine, but _why?_ Immigrants weren’t uncommon in Brooklyn, not by a long shot. Steve’s own mother had been an immigrant. Why make up a boring, corn-fed hometown at all? Wouldn’t that be hard to pull off? What kind of forged documents would even be available back then that a single mother with two small children could obtain on entering the country? And—

Wait.

Hold on. _Wait_. What?

“What do you mean ‘as a seal?’” 

Way to bury the lead, man.

“You know,” Bucky says, shifting around a little as his nervous fidgeting finally takes physical form. “As a seal.”

“ _As_ a seal.”

Sam watches him for a moment, more than half expecting the punchline of a “you fell for it” joke. No punchline arrives.

“Does Steve know about this?”

“Yeah.”

“So if we get back home and I walk up to him and I say ‘your childhood friend is one hell of a furry,’ he’s going to know what I’m talking about.”

Bucky finally looks at him, his face scrunching into his patented “what the hell” look. “Furry,” he says, clearly exploring a new term without the benefit of JARVIS, Stark, Nat, or even Google to provide a clear definition. 

“I mean…” Bucky says, “I… guess? Back then we were called selkies. I kinda prefer selkie, if it’s all the same to you.” 

He sounds like he’s not one hundred percent sure if selkie is currently on the “oh no, don’t say that word, it is _not_ cool to say that word” list, and is hoping it’s still okay to use.

Which means… or which very strongly hints, anyway… that… 

Sam opens his mouth and then closes it. Repeats this a few times. Lifts a hand out from under the blanket and gives that blanket a stroke. Damn, it’s so soft. And then he really _looks_ at the blanket for the first time since waking up groggy and warm and coughing in Bucky’s arms.

It has flippers. The blanket… has flippers. Down there at the bottom that’s all bunched up in a pile instead of spread out flat. In that sorta-corner. And that other sorta-corner. A pair of flippers. Actual… flippers.

“Okay,” he finally manages. “So you’re saying.” 

Sam scans the room, looking for words. 

There’s a little fire that’s struggling off to one side, and their clothes hanging up near it. There’s a little chair that’s halfway broken down into kindling, and there’s a metal arm resting on the seat of what’s left. Bucky’s metal arm. Which is not attached to him and looks like it’s been through what was _not_ an amicable divorce from the rest of him.

“You’re saying you were an actual seal. When you were born. You came out of your mama with flippers. She didn’t count your toes, because she was a seal. And you were a seal. And seals don’t _have_ toes.”

Bucky takes in a breath and lets it out soft and slow. “I’m saying that. Yeah.”

Sam nods. 

He looks down between them under the blanket at Bucky’s left shoulder, where it presses into the thin pad they’re lying on. It’s all gnarled and scarred up same as usual where the arm meets—met—the rest of him. And where the part that used to flow into an arm was, there’s just bits of twisty metal plating bent inward to avoid catching on things.

“And your whole family, you peeled off your own skins until you were humans on two legs, and then moved to Brooklyn. To be humans. Instead of seals.”

Bucky’s lips twist into something that’s too bitter to be called a smile. “Not humans, no. Selkies. We can slip out of our pelts and _look_ like humans. And we can slip back into them to become seals again. But we’re not human. We don’t… belong, like that. There’s different rules for us.”

Sam makes a mental note to ask about the bitterness later, maybe over some damn hot chocolate. At a ski lodge. He also makes a mental note to question his life and all the choices he’s made along the way that got him here. 

Except that here, well, here isn’t too bad, aside from the fact that it’s not a ski lodge and that he’s currently facing the sheer impossibility that Bucky saved his life with apparently-not-make-believe seal magic instead of historically-proven Nazi science juice. He wonders if the “trapped as a fisherman’s wife” deal is a real thing. That would really suck.

“You dove in after me.” And he did. He must have. Sam hadn’t gotten caught on the way down. He’d just plain sank like a rock, and Bucky had… had gone in after and fetched him back to the surface. As a seal.

That warm feeling deep inside him floods back in with a hot rush at the realization of the obvious answer to the “how did we get here” question. The warm feeling that’s made out of affection and not just the body heat radiating off of the super sol—seal? super seal? super selkie? what exactly is going on there, serum-wise?

“You—” Sam tries to decide whether it makes more sense that Bucky stripped naked first or just wrapped this blanket—pelt—around himself before jumping. Either way, though… “You _swam_ after me. You _tore your arm off_ and jumped right in. You… you…”

Bucky is back to looking uncomfortable. “Look, I’m _sorry_. I know teams work best when everyone knows what everyone else has up their sleeve. It’s just…” 

“I’m not mad.” Sam skims his hand over Bucky’s right shoulder and figures he can still probably blame the cold if asked about it. “You saved my _life_ , why would I be mad? I mean, I’m shocked as hell and I’m not sure I really believe any of this yet.” 

Though with centenarian super soldiers getting frozen and thawed out, billionaires with glorified car batteries in their chests and scientists who turn into very _un_ -jolly green giants running around with aliens swinging magic hammers on any given Tuesday, who’s to say a guy who turns into a seal is a stretch of the imagination?

“But I’m not mad,” Sam reiterates. “I can see how you’d want to keep those cards close to the vest.” Especially if the magic forced-marriage thing is real. And the Indiana story makes sense, now, too. Shit. Who’d guess “selkie” when the bio says “land-locked Midwestern state?”

“Out of curiosity,” Sam asks, “just how close to the vest _do_ you keep those cards? So I don’t tip your hand.”

Bucky doesn’t look relieved yet, but he at least doesn’t look outright uncomfortable. “Um. Steve knows. You know.” He shrugs.

“What, that’s _it?_ ”

“If someone steals and hides my pelt, they pretty much _own_ me until I can find it and steal it back.” Bucky frowns. “It’s better if no one knows.”

So the fisherman’s unwilling wife deal _is_ how it goes down. Damn. Guess the selkie life ain’t all fish and frolicking in the kelp.

Sam puts his hand to his chest. “I solemnly swear to leave your pelt where you put it and to not run off with it, even though it’s the softest and warmest blanket known to man and it’s really, really cold in this poacher’s shack.”

Bucky blinks at him and then laughs. “You really _do_ do everything Steve does, but slower. That’s the first thing he said to me when he found out.”

“Except sub ‘poacher’s shack’ for ‘tenement housing,’ I guess?” Sam grins. 

“Well, how else was that scrawny punk supposed to survive a Brooklyn winter without heat? It’s not like he had an ounce of blubber to his name.”

* * *

When the last of the chair is finally burned up and there’s only a bit of table left to feed the fire, Sam gets his first real look at Bucky as the man goes to rip off another few chunks of tabletop.

He’s seen plenty in the locker room, when they’re training or showering after training. And he’s seen quite a lot while they’re all sitting around on the quinjet after an op taking turns stitching each other up. And he’s not at all blind when there’s a pool party and Bucky elects on the ever-so-rare occasion to go without a shirt.

But there’s something about watching him slither out from under the pelt-blanket in the nude, watching him lever up bits of wood from the skeleton of a rickety table, watching him crouch in front of a pathetic fire and nudge it back to a slightly less pathetic life.

There’s something about the lines of his back, the curve of his hips and butt, the shifting muscles in his thighs as he goes about stoking the fire. And there’s something about the sight of all the _rest_ of him on display as he flips over their winter gear and mutters about having to burn the whole hut down to keep the fire going.

More importantly, there’s something about the look in his eyes and the quirk of his lips when he sees Sam holding up a corner of the pelt-blanket to invite him back inside where it’s warm. Maybe their strictly professional relationship can go up in flames like that table and chair combo, sacrificed in an effort to stay warm.

Maybe it won’t even take hot chocolate in a ski lodge.

Bucky slips back under the pelt-blanket, pressing against Sam’s front, since Sam never bothered to roll back around.

“Feels kinda intimate, knowing your deep, dark, selkie secret,” Sam says with a smile. It’s an invitation, maybe, if Bucky wants to pick it up. It’s just a statement, if he doesn’t. Sam can go back to strictly professional coworkers after cuddling naked for warmth. Sure. Not a problem.

“You know,” Bucky says, “I’m finding that I don’t mind as long as it’s you.” An arm snakes back around Sam, hand pressed to the center of his back now, instead of his chest. “Gotta keep you warm, don’t I?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Even half-drowned, I’m a far cry from a scrawny asthmatic.”

“Yeah, but you _are_ a punk,” Bucky murmurs, his fingers trailing along Sam’s shoulder blades. “You’re stacked, doll, sturdier than this wretched lean-to. But still a blubberless, ice-breaking punk.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment, Barnes. Your flirting game could use some polish.”

Bucky grins. “Ain’t flirting. It’s the truth. You’ve got muscles for days, hon, but muscles aren’t gonna keep you warm at night when you go for an arctic swim.”

“Yeah?” Sam slips his arm under Bucky’s and pulls them a bit closer together, not caring quite so much that the, uh, _situation_ from before is making a return visit, this time maybe to stay. Particularly because his situation seems to have company down there. “What are you going to do about that? Can’t have me freezing to death out here.”

“I might know a few ways to warm a guy up. It’s ancient selkie knowledge, passed down through the generations.”

Sam chokes back a laugh, and it comes out half-cough, half-snort. “You’re so full of shit, Barnes. Full up to the _top_ with grade-A seal shit.”

“I’ll have you know, seal shit is medicinal. It’s great for wound care.”

Sam somehow manages to avoid coughing up an _entire_ lung despite laughing hard enough to make his ribs ache. “Oh god, shut _up_ ,” he wheezes. “I’m gonna bust a rib!”

The look in Bucky’s eyes from earlier is back. “Can I kiss it better?”

Sam’s breath catches in a very different way than before, and he drops his eyes to look at Bucky’s lips. _Dear strictly professional relationship_ , he thinks, _it was nice knowing you. So long. Maybe even good riddance._

“Yeah,” he breathes. “Come show me your ancient selkie knowledge, Barnes.”

* * *

“So about earlier,” Sam says as he eyes the reader to look for the quinjet’s approach and the moment their signals sync up and they aren’t, strictly speaking, _alone_ anymore. “If your selkie mama passed that down to you, Barnes—”

Bucky laughs as he feeds the last of the poacher’s shack to the last of the little fire. “I can promise you she didn’t. That was all street learning. My ma was a respectable selkie woman whose mouth never _touched_ a man’s—”

“Quinjet,” Sam says, hoping he spotted the signal before their extraction team overheard any of Bucky’s secrets. Hell, even without the selkie parts, he’d rather no one overhear them talking about who Bucky’s sainted mother had or had not blown in her time on this green earth.

Bucky nods his thanks and prods at the fire with his metal arm, holding it by the wrist in his right hand like a muscled fireplace poker.

“How long you think it’ll take Stark to fix that for you?” Sam asks, mostly to act natural while they might be coming through on someone’s speakers, but also because he’s maybe low-key looking forward to a replay where Bucky has both arms at his disposal.

“Eh, maybe a week, tops. Probably only a day or two, though.” He shrugs and leaves the fire to its own devices. “We were on pretty good terms before this op, and he’s always been itching to play with it.”

Bucky crouches down beside him and looks over his shoulder at the reader. “You mind if we only keep some of those cards a secret?”

Sam looks over at him. “The high stakes cards, you mean? Kings, Queens and all that?”

“Yeah. But I’m okay with…” Bucky shakes his head. “Not okay. I’d be pretty _happy_ if the rest of the team got to see all the Jacks we had up our sleeves.”

“The Jacks.” Sam thinks he knows what Bucky means. He _hopes_ he knows what Bucky means.

Bucky nods, and his eyes are crinkled at the sides like maybe he’s grinning under the scarf wrapped around his face. “Yeah, got all those _Jacks off_ the secret list, laid ‘em _bare_ on the table, that kind of thing.”

Sam raises an eyebrow at him. “Wow, you are not nearly as smooth as you think you are.”

“I don’t think I’m smooth at all. Not anymore. I’m like one big rough edge at this point. Forgot how to be smooth.” He shrugs. “Must’ve been all the torture and brainwashing.”

“Yeah, must’ve been.”

Bucky is quiet for a moment. “So? Do you mind?”

Sam shakes his head. “Nah, I think I’d like that. I kissed our professional relationship goodbye when I kissed you hello.”

Now Sam _knows_ Bucky is grinning as he slings his remaining arm around Sam’s shoulders and draws him close.

“You know it gets damn cold in New York City, Sammy-doll,” Bucky murmurs. “Can’t wait to keep you warm there, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't _think_ this one is going to turn into a series? But let's be real here. Everything I've published so far has, so it's anyone's guess. What sort of situations would people want to see our dynamic duo face if this did expand?


End file.
